I am not who I was, but I know who I am.

I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am.

Yes. When I’m writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.

"All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?"

I know writing is what I do but I still don't see myself as one.

Now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account. [...] I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder. Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself, or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.

I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.

It is only through writing that I become myself

I'm always trying to put my own self into words—who am I?

I am one thing, my writings are another.

I write to discover what I think.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I am the sort of writer who needs another form to tell me who I am and what has happened to me…I think all my novels are self-portraits, but there’s no one character who resolves me, or catalyses me, or is me.

I write to discover what I think